
Thursday, December 04, 2014

Do terrorists target urban environments more now than in past days?
Purely descriptive analysis of a change of time in terrorists targeting behavior

The GTD is a powerful database!
Figure 1: attacks per year in all world regions
Figure 2: attacks per year in all world regions, indicating transition of collectors: PGIS - 1997, CETIS - 2008, ISVG - 2011, START since 2011


UrbanityWe use absolute and relative city size (population) as a proxy for urbanity.
Validity
Reliability
Within single and across datasets
| Issue | Example | Detail | Solution |
|---|---|---|---|
Inconsistency |
Spellings |
|
|
Quality |
Typos Errors |
"Arabistan" |
|
Bias |
Underreportings Definitions |
|
|
Adjusting City and Country Names
X<-gsub("^Teberan","Tehran", X, ignore.case=TRUE)
X<-gsub("^Teheran","Tehran", X, ignore.case=TRUE)
X<-gsub("^Teherau","Tehran", X, ignore.case=TRUE)
X<-gsub("^Tehram","Tehran", X, ignore.case=TRUE)"Reassigning" Cities to Countries
GTD$country_txt[GTD$country_txt == "Soviet Union" &
GTD$city =="Osh" ] <- "Kyrgyzstan"
GTD$country_txt[GTD$country_txt == "Soviet Union" &
GTD$city =="Riga" ] <- "Latvia"
GTD$country_txt[GTD$country_txt == "Yugoslavia" &
GTD$city =="Bogicevica" ] <- "Albania"
GTD$country_txt[GTD$country_txt == "Yugoslavia" &
GTD$city =="Banjica" ] <- "Serbia"Geo Referencing absolute & relative city positionProximity Referencing each city by assigning it to its closest Urban CenterRelative City Size as a share of each countries' largest cityies'total populationPast Populations using country level data and growth ratesCities' Rank Size given by the population on a country, regional, and world levelControl Variables for capitals, largest cities, inter-state war, intra-state war, extra-in war, extra-out war, and coastal megacitiesWe merge city level, country level, and GTD data together to a reproducible database containing 114086 observations on 44 variables.
We use a simple linear regression, depending on Relative City Sizes attacked over time for various world regions. We control for
| # | City | Country | Attacks (Peace) |
|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Santiago |
Chile |
1426 |
2 |
Belfast |
United Kingdom |
1187 |
3 |
Karachi |
Pakistan |
1155 |
4 |
Bogota |
Colombia |
845 |
5 |
Medellin |
Colombia |
808 |
| # | Region | Attacks |
|---|---|---|
1 |
S. Asia |
25854 |
2 |
MENA |
25250 |
3 |
S. America |
16917 |
4 |
W. Europe |
13217 |
5 |
C. America |
10158 |
| Human Damage | City | Country | Killed+Injured |
|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Baghdad |
Iraq |
4345 |
2 |
Lima |
Peru |
2163 |
3 |
Karachi |
Pakistan |
1879 |
4 |
Belfast |
United Kingdom |
1706 |
5 |
San Salvador |
El Salvador |
1491 |
| # | Group | Country | Total Attacks |
|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Shining Path |
Peru |
4533 |
2 |
FMNLF |
El Salvador |
3351 |
3 |
Taliban |
Afghanistan |
3204 |
4 |
IRA |
United Kingdom |
2673 |
5 |
FARC |
Colombia |
2228 |
First, the Master's Thesis!Cutter, Susan, Douglas B Richardson, and Thomas J Wilbanks. 2003. The Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism. Routledge.
Kilcullen, David. 2013. Out of the Mountains: the coming age of the urban guerrilla. Oxford University Press.
START. 2013. Global Terrorism Database \(GTD\). Maryland: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism; Responses to Terrorism. http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd.